Storm Corrosion – Drag Ropes Video

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Not long to go now until the much anticipated collaboration between prolific Porucupine Tree mainman Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt, leader and chief creative driving force for Swedish progressive metal legends OPETH, Storm Corrosion is released and we can’t wait.

“We never discussed what we were going to do,” recalls Åkerfeldt. “I went down to hang out at Steven’s house and we drank wine and talked about music, but neither of us had anything prepared. We wrote the song ‘Drag Ropes’ that first night, and we both thought it was pretty cool. We’d never heard anything like it and it doesn’t really sound like our bands. We found our own niche, right then and there.”

“It was special, different and intriguing,” agrees Wilson. “We ran in the opposite direction of the idea of a prog metal supergroup that people had been talking about and expecting from us. It was a chance to delve into more experimental ideas. We were being wilfully self-indulgent in the best possible way, making music to please ourselves. There’s something wonderfully pure and liberating about that you can hear that in these songs.”

And today we’re excited to be able to share with you the first track that Steven and Mikael wrote for this project, ‘Drag Ropes’. The video is almost a full 10 minutes long and is a stunning display of shadow puppetry. The video was animated by a South African stop motion animator called Jess Cope and was dreamed up and created in a small town near Cape Town called Betty’s Bay. The ‘Drag Ropes’ video echoes the haunted theme of the song perfectly – both beautiful and devastating, it’s an awesome combination of both music and images. We don’t want to ruin the story so check it out below to see what all the fuss is about:

“For me, self-indulgence is one of the fundamental things about being an artist,” Wilson concludes. “Do not make music or art to please other people. If you do, you’ve stopped being an artist and you’ve become an entertainer. This is a very cinematic, impressionistic and immersive record. We just got together and it poured out of us. With this record you’re entering into a very unusual and unfamiliar sonic universe and that’s a very exciting thing to be part of.”